τεκνίον
little child
‘little child’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Case
- Vocative
- The case of direct address (“O Lord”).
Gender
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
Every verse where G5040 appears in the Book of 1 John — 7 distinct verses. Click any verse to open its interlinear word-by-word view. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context — . Each verse’s Greek form is shown with its reference; the English is not keyword-highlighted, since the data carries no word-level English alignment. Use “Compare translations” on any verse to read it across multiple English versions. This concordance covers the Greek New Testament; Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) occurrences of this word are not indexed here.
1 John
- 1 John 2:1 Τεκνία n voc pl neut My little children, I write these things to you so that you may not sin. If anyone sins, we have a Counselor with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous.
- 1 John 2:12 τεκνία n voc pl neut I write to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for his name's sake.
- 1 John 2:28 τεκνία n voc pl neut Now, little children, remain in him, that when he appears, we may have boldness, and not be ashamed before him at his coming.
- 1 John 3:7 Τεκνία n voc pl neut Little children, let no one lead you astray. He who does righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous.
- 1 John 3:18 Τεκνία n voc pl neut My little children, let's not love in word only, neither with the tongue only, but in deed and truth.
- 1 John 4:4 τεκνία n voc pl neut You are of God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world.
- 1 John 5:21 Τεκνία n voc pl neut Little children, keep yourselves from idols.
About this entry
At a glance — auto-summarized from this page’s data, not written by a person. Every figure links to its source below. This summary describes the numbers; it doesn’t interpret them.
At its core, τεκνιον (tekníon) means “little child.” The word gravitates to 1 John (88%), then John. It turns up in 8 verses across 2 books, an uncommon footprint. It first appears in John 13:33. Ranging over 2 senses, it is not a single-sense word. Dig into 8-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G5040 catalogs a Greek word from the Greek New Testament.
These counts are not copied from any lexicon or concordance. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged Greek New Testament. What Lemma adds →
- 8
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 8 distinct verses.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,240
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,240 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 8 occurrences in the concordance →
By traditional corpus
Conventional, traditional groupings — biblical authorship is debated, so this is a traditional corpus grouping, not an authorship claim. Some books belong to more than one corpus (Luke is in both the Gospels and the Lukan corpus, and so on), so these shares overlap and need not total 100%. Each figure is a share of the word’s 8 distinct verses.
- Johannine 8 verses · 100%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 7 verses · 88%
- Gospels 1 verse · 13%
How translations render this word
Counts come from each version’s own published word-to-Strong’s tagging or interlinear alignment — an approximate guide to how each version renders this word, not a word-level alignment the data otherwise carries. Because each total is that version’s own tagged count, the per-version totals vary from one another and need not match the appearance or distinct-verse counts above. These counts may also differ from a printed concordance because Lemma counts each distinctly tagged rendering and does not collapse phrase taggings into a single head-word total. This is a fixed set of word-tagged versions (KJV, ASV, BSB, ULT) and does not change with the reading translation you choose elsewhere. Each version’s license is shown beside its name below (and on Sources).
- King James Version: Little children 9×
- American Standard Version: Little children 9×
- Berean Standard Bible: Little children 8×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Little children 8×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G5040 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G5040 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G5040 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G5040 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in Thayer's
The 2 senses Thayer's distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency or importance). The full entry — with sub-senses — is in the Lexicon Entry tab.
- a little child
- in the NT used as a term of kindly address by teachers to their disciples
Word origin
Derived from τεκνον (téknon) (G5043) — child.
Diminutive of G5043 ; an infant that is (plural figurative) darlings (Christian converts ): - little children.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G5040 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| Τεκνία Teknía | Noun, Vocative, Plural, Neuter | 1 John 2:1 | 4 |
| τεκνία teknía | Noun, Vocative, Plural, Neuter | John 13:33 | 4 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G5040, grouped by Strong’s listed origin. These share a root / origin per the lexicon — not necessarily a shared meaning. Each links to that word’s own entry.
Derives from
Shares the same root
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
